


fire and brimstone

by duckbunny



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 05:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10610205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckbunny/pseuds/duckbunny
Summary: It is not always the victors who write the history.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iniquiticity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iniquiticity/gifts).



He was so fragile, in the end. The bullet tore through him like wet paper, soaked with the ink of a thousand thousand words he’ll never write. Such a tiny thing, a bullet, without even the shaft of an arrow to show how the thread was cut. No larger than the tip of your finger. There was no pretence of a glorious struggle between us. No great battle. Only the brutal honesty of a gun.

He screamed when his life snapped. I couldn’t tell you whether he used his voice. But he screamed, and it echoed off the suddenly-emptier sky and the back of my skull, and my hand shook when I lowered the gun.

They do not often shake. They are not shaking now, as I nurse a measure of whisky that cannot get me drunk.

There is wailing in the streets.

I met him a hundred years ago. Or twenty. Or three days. It’s hard to be sure without counting. I met him almost fresh off the boat, an eager young man lying about his age, clutching his books like talismans of a future not yet born. Ambition rolled off him like the reek of sulphur. I shook his hand and saw the coals burning in his eyes and I knew, I was sure, in that crowded street at the start of a revolution, that he had no idea what he was.

I’ve no idea who his parents were. Which of them carried the blood. Perhaps they both did; that side of the family has spread itself very wide. I do know that Alexander never had a choice who he would be. The sins of the fathers, you understand, visited upon the children, even unto the seventh generation – there was never a chance of the blessing for him.

(Never the pain of the fall, his wings tattering to black-burnt leather, the earth rising up to cage him in and the terrible smallness of the world and the hunger, the hollow agony rending his flesh forever – I would be glad, if I could, that this unholy thing never knew its loss.)

I thought on that first meeting that I might have to kill him. It would have been no great hardship back then. He was a monstrosity and ought to be cleansed from the earth. But I took him for a drink first to make sure, and saw how his face lit up when he met the children, and that was that. There are rules no servant of the light can break. He was so hungry to be part of something bigger than himself, some great human endeavour he could build for its own sake, that would outlive him – That hunger saved him, then and ever after. He was mortal enough to shine with it.

I never said anything to Laurens, to warn him. Or to Eliza. I don’t know what I could have said.

The war dragged on forever, a handful of eternal days, an endless Holy Saturday stretched out over years. They suffered and bled and died. Alexander lived.

I hoped, sometimes, that he would die. He came close. It would have been simpler if he’d drowned, cleaner if he’d starved. But his sort is a little more tenacious than the rest and Alexander sank his claws into life and would not let go.

I did not follow him to war. It was Washington I came for, father of the young nation, wringing his hands in the snow while his misbegot child gasped for breath. I spread my wings for Washington and when he saw me dark and smiling beneath the trees he cursed at me for chasing the holy thing away.

(As if I could have been chased off by one ragged soldier with a musket.)

It did not make us better friends.

It is wrong to wish death on any of God’s creatures. I will not say, I regret that Alexander lived. Regret is not the word in any case.

It complicated things.

By the end of the war he had married his Eliza and they had had young Philip, and I could not stay away. Do not misunderstand me. I mean I was not permitted to. I had Alexander pressing close on one side, fire drawn to fire, and duty hemming me in on the other. I could not leave Alexander to wander the world unobserved, already entwining himself in the sinews of the young country and yearning for the splendours of kingship. He would make too much mischief, with nobody to guard him. He would build and break too much. So I stayed.

Years passed. I think years. A month, at least. The smallness of time slips away from my fingers. But there was time bound up in that place, the baby bouncing on Alexander’s knee and the ink stains on our fingers and the trials, the imperfect stumbling towards the perfection of justice, teaching the mortals even as we defeated them. I could almost forget that he was mortal himself, until I saw the exhaustion in his bent shoulders. I could almost forget he was more, except for the baby.

He didn’t get it from Eliza. She was mortal through to her bones and heartbreaking with it. No, that child’s inheritance came from his father, and he never would sleep in my arms. We would write briefs long into the shadowed night and Alexander would suggest we could retire to his house for brandy, and he would smile that rueful smile of knowing I would refuse, and that if I had accepted the baby would have fussed until I left and robbed Eliza of her sleep.

I came for Sunday lunches anyway. Alexander did not always go to church. Would sit too upright and listen too politely to the sermons. I could see them sliding off him like water from glass. We would eat together after the holy feast and talk about work.

But the baby, ah. Philip. Young Philip, named for his grandfather, with none of his patience. Little Philip wanted everything at once, would cry because he could not both eat and play with only one pair of hands. Philip would scream for his mother when he saw me come to the house and hide behind her skirts, and scowl at me if I came too close.

I could not leave Alexander alone to raise a child like that. Not out of friendship. We were never _friends_ , the almost-human creature and I. I did not stay because I cared for him. I only could not leave him with a baby who took too much after his father.

There is a memory as sharp as glass. I can see it reflected in my whisky. Alexander, without Washington, when Alexander’s words had come roaring from his throat for the last time. Washington was always his mouthpiece, and Alexander always wrote what Washington wanted to say; fire and thunder driving each other. Alexander poured his soul into the page and the words sang out, and then it was over.

I remember Alexander in his office, his shadow flung up on the wall behind him, brooding. It was after we’d fallen out, I remember that. I needed to keep a closer eye on things and he was jealous of his power. So we’d argued, and the tension ran high between us, almost tangible, a wire drawn so tight it hummed, and I glanced into his office that night not expecting him to mutter “Get in here.”

The words fade. I don’t remember them. It’s the moments that stay with me, the candlelight flickering to feather the edges of his shadow. The honest pain when he asked if Washington had ever been kind to me, as he was to Alexander, if I could understand, if I could share - and I watched the darkness flare behind his eyes and said that no two griefs were ever like. I watched the moon rise behind his head like a halo of ice. I poured him a drink.

Philip grew older, and Philip grew more dangerous, and the words - incubus, succubus, vampire, witch - the words are imprecise. Philip learned to light candles by clicking his fingers and his hair smelt of brimstone; is that enough? Philip learned to put the charm in his voice just as his father had but his father did it with honest labour and Philip threw it all into “hello”. Philip was a careless, clever snake, and the duel was his own idea.

I whispered to Eacker. He was a brute, but one with high ideas of religion. It got the job done. Philip was taking far too many risks; it was not my fault that he gambled too much.

We were never friends. I did not grieve for his son. I shed no tears for Eliza.

The whisky cannot get me drunk, but it burns in my throat like the memory of Alexander’s hands, on another night of grief.

He came to me when he felt too strongly. I remember that. As if, without knowing what he was, he still sensed the kinship between us. When the fire in him ran so hot that his mortal frame might crack under the strain, he would come to me. Sometimes we would talk. Often we would fight, him throwing accusations as if I were the Divine itself, me casting back every principle he had ever betrayed, every lie he’d ever told, as if I could shock him into repentance. And sometimes, when the storm had faded to rain upon the windows, we would sit together and rest from the world.

I do not miss him.

After Philip, he came the closest he had ever been to awakening. I watched him very closely in his mourning. He drew back from his work, the threads of ambition going loose in his hands. He went to church, without prompting, and sometimes in the distance like the whispering of the sea I heard him pray. Not my doing, not mine to take pride in, but I rejoiced all the same.

I went into law to watch the country, into politics to watch Alexander. I ran for President expecting to fail – not all of God’s creatures are made to rule - and thereby to keep Jefferson under my eye, that very human devil. They knew what he was doing on his plantation. They voted for him anyway. The Fall, still echoing through time, endless ripples. It worked, but it tempted Alexander into meddling again. Not my doing. Not mine to regret.

He came back out of hiding and stoked his own fires into a blaze and the judgement was not mine to make. We are all executioners sometimes, and I was nearest; why should the duty not have fallen to me? We were not friends. What pain was there to spare me from?

I could not simply kill him. It is not that simple. There must always be a choice, for a creature as close to human as he was. There must always be a path not taken. And always, there are the laws to be kept, of God and of men. So I did not break them. He raged at me and I took up his flung insults as I never had before. I set out the bait and he snapped it up eagerly, incurably hungry to act, to gamble with lives, to change history.

I did not make him come to his death.

I expected him to shoot. That would have been the end of this lifetime, for me, and a final damnation for him, but it would have been his own. I lured Alexander out to Weehawken to kill me and Alexander came, and had I succeeded - had I failed - he would have lived and the judgement against him stand unfulfilled, another chance, another turn of the earth for Alexander to build with. The Alexander I knew would never have been resigned to death - what was he doing, before that scream ripped the heavens? What on Earth was he thinking? Why didn’t he shoot?

I watched him fall. I was not allowed to speak with him.

He is bleeding still, miles from where I sit. The life has not quite left him. I can feel the words beating against his chest, still trying to escape as his breath is failing. It won’t be long now.

I am not sorry.


End file.
